#paper review

[godsandcrows]

Karst Stone Paper - journal review

Decided to try out a new brand of journal and thought I'd post a lil review. I didn't find one when I was ordering it, so maybe someone else will find this helpful (:

I bought a Karst A5 dot notebook. Mostly because it was the only really good color red notebook I would find and I was looking for red. Also though, I was really interested in it because the paper is not made from trees. It's made from sustainably recycled stone! I thought it was super cool and ya know, save the environment.

I did a light sketch using a Blackwing pearl pencil. Even with very light pressure, the pencil goes on suuuuper dark. Extremely smooth, zero drag. My pencil was super sharp, and you can tell. There's a lot of raised through on the other side of the page, though it does taper off later in the drawing as my pencil dulled, so if you don't go in with a freshly sharpened, or if you aren't a pencil person, you'd be alright.

Now, my biggest complaint. (And probably a deal breaker for its intended purpose as my daily journal, still trying to decide.)

I tried to erase my sketch to go over it in pen, and it will not erase. Not even with ole betsy Staedtler Mars. I eventually gave up trying and just started inking because I was like whelp might as well make this a test subject instead of a sketch in a journal I use every day, at this point.

Ink goes on really well. Honestly, surprisingly well given how much smeared lead it was going over. You can see the ink through the other side, but there is zero bleed through to the other side.

So if you're ink only, and don't care about being able to erase or use a sharp pencil, this could be the journal for you. But I wouldn't recommend it to a pencil artist or someone wanting to be able to edit their to-do list.

[mins0o]

Half-ass Book Review #005 - [Mental Health]

"Healing Back Pain - The Mind Body Connection"(1991) by John E. Sarno, MD

I was introduced to this book on an episode of Conan O'Brian's podcast, where he mentioned about this book. His sentiment on the book was very positive.

As I also felt frequent fatigue on my lower back, I thought maybe I would give it a try.

The main contribution of the book is the recognition of the link between mental health and physical pain, as well as trying to breakthrough a common stubbornness of modern medicine.

Dr. Sarno has seen many patients with chronic, even acute pain for some. Most if not all of the patients sought physical or chemical treatment such as massage, drugs or even surgery, and almost all doctors were the ones driving this consensus.

According to Dr. Sarno, over half of the cases the pain starts out gradually. Another thing he noticed is that many patients with the Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), as he calls, can easily recognize themselves with perfectionism, or was preoccupied with other stressful things in their life.

Stitching this information, Dr. Sarno came to a conclusion that the psychological strain the patients were going through has caused the pain.

The extreme stress a person goes through, either it's divorce, compulsion to achieve goal in work, friction with ones family, is a pill that is too hard to swallow. As response, our body tenses up certain muscle and induces pain, providing distraction for the patient.

The treatment for it? Dr. Sarno has tried combinations of psychotherapy, education, and physical treatments. But as far as he is concerned, providing only the education has helped the most. Just providing the notion that it is not a structural abnormality that is causing the pain, but it is the mental stress has helped the patient contemplate on it and ease the stress on their own.

One of the questions one could ask is then how does the pain outlive the actual problem it cause? The answer is that since the patient thinks the pain is caused by a triggering physical activity, the patient becomes hyper aware not to pain oneself again. This very factor, adds into the cause and will last even when the actual problem has gone away. The "fear of another attack" maintains the tension, and the fear often does come true.

This is because the main culprit of this syndrome is "anxiety". There are many ways anxiety can be started, even with the people who you absolutely love. For example, "the need to be loved, admire, respected; the drive to achieve" is something that isn't inherently a negative feeling or a harmful thinking. But it is quite easy to see how these can give stress to anyone.

The hardest part of the treatment is to let the patient accept that this is the correct diagnosis. Those who happened to improve on their situation on long term were the ones who could accept this knowledge therapy.

Dr. Sarno says he has also asked himself many times that "How do I know that what I am doing is not a placebo?" but it seems to work significantly well.

[kris-monster]

That about sums it up! I have 3 more papers to test and I'll keep updating you all on it if you're interested in trying the papers yourself!

[lizstaleyart]

So I'm prepping for Inktober(/OCtober) and I wanted a sketchbook or some other bound pad of paper to make my images in. Went to the store and picked up this pad of Copic marker paper. I was skeptical as all hell because this stuff is THIN. Almost tracing paper thin. In fact I printed my digital sketch off and laid it under the page to trace it with the inking pen and didn't need to backlight it at all because it's that thin. The last time I had marker paper that wasn't like cardstock or Bristol board, it bled through like crazy, so I was certain I was going to be taking this stuff back.

I have to say that I am INSANELY impressed with this paper. I blended heavily on it and actively tried to get the markers to bleed through. There are a few tiny spots of bleed through on the page under the finished image but they're hard to see because they're that tiny. Very happy with this marker paper and can't wait to use it for Inktober!

[mins0o]

Half-ass Paper(?) Review #003 - [Mental Health]

Does discussing suicide make people feel more suicidal? By Claudia Hammond 13th January 2014 on bbc.com

This article is not a paper but rather a review on a certain topic.

The shortest summary is that it is probably better to duscuss about sucidal thoughts with the patient, but stay away from the methods.

A few more things worth mentioning are:

A significant portion of doctors were hesitant to bring up discussions of suicidal thoughts of the patient, and one of the reasons were the fear of themselves not having enough expertise to handle the matter.

Studies show that discussing the thoughts may decrease the likelihood of further distress and, at least, does not increase the chance of it.

Probable reason why is because discussing it broadens the view of the patient's situation, and helps finding alternative ways to resolve it.

[mins0o]

Half-ass Paper Review #002 - [Productivity]

Ferrari, Joseph R., and Timothy A. Pychyl. "If I Wait, My Partner Will Do It:" The Role of Conscientiousness as a Mediator in the Relation of Academic Procrastination and Perceived Social Loafing." North American Journal of Psychology 14.1 (2012).

For me, the biggest significance of reading this paper is that I learned about what an "Internal Consistency" of a measurement is, in statistical term. This video helped a lot. Turns out, at least in the earlier days of the field of psychology, internal consistencies were measured with Cronbach's (1951) Coefficient Alpha. I am now also interested in investigating more about t-test and z-test, and in overall statistics.

This paper is rather insignificant in my honest opinion. It is about the research on academic procrastination, social loafing(relying on other for completion of task), and conscientiousness.

The researchers do try to make it interesting by comparing self-perceived measurements and partner-perceived measurement. But still, the result - positive correlation between procrastination-social loafing, and negative correlation between procrastination/social loafing-conscientiousness - is not so surprising

Internal Consistency video by Sprightly Pedagogue on YouTube.

[mins0o]

Half-ass Paper Review #001 - [Productivity]

Dewitte, Siegfried, and Willy Lens. "Procrastinators lack a broad action perspective." European Journal of Personality 14.2 (2000): 121-140.

TL;DR (my takeaway) Non-procrastinators know the details of the tasks but views the task in general description. (This is my own inference from the paper) -> To achieve more, try to look in bigger picture. If you lack general view of the task, it's easier for you to fall into the procrastination trap.

Two concepts - Procrastination: putting ones intention to later, rather than enacting it when it arose. --- Optimistic: Confident that they can finish the task --- Pessimistic: Are aware that they are behind the schedule. Incompetent and is afraid of revealing their lack of capability -Perspective of actions: simply put, answers to "what are you doing" -> so called "action identity" --- the Generality Dimension - broad - medium - detailed "keeping up with course" - "reading a paper" - "trying to understand [*] in the paper"

Side note 01: Higher the competence, simpler/broader task description yields better performance.

One of the study results: In both opti and pessi, procrastinators showed detailed action identity than the non-procrastinators.

Side note 02: Vallacher and Wegner (1985) - lower action identity performed better in parenting ("I'm preparing my kid for school" is better than "I'm preparing for my kid's future")

[simpler7045]

SW Development Process using Artificial neural networks

SW Development Process using Artificial neural networks

This posting refers a paper whose title is “A software development process model for artificial neural networks in critical applications(1999)”.

It is very interesting paper and it will help readers can understand what SW development processes using AI are even though they don’t have deep knowledge about AI.

It is an old paper, and I’d like to search a new one. but it can be a good starting point…

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